People have long sought ways to control (i.e., lose, gain, and/or maintain) body weight. Controlling body weight has many implications to people's lives, including: physical health, mental health, and professional and social status. Entire industries have been formed to assist individuals who seek assistance in weight control. Such industries include medical care, food production, publishing, workout facilities, and support groups, to name a few.
Weight control programs (e.g., diets) to control body weight have been developed by many individuals, groups, and organizations and disseminated throughout the different industries. Some of the weight control programs may be considered proprietary and others are publicly available. For example, medical organizations may provide patients with weight control programs that have been developed for patients, but not made publicly available otherwise. Developers of weight control programs earn money by making the programs publicly available through various sources, including books, videos, lectures and tapes, for example. And, of course, the rules of weight control programs and the food types that they prescribe are all different. The diversity of different weight control programs throughout the weight loss industry is considerable: diets range from those ordered by a physician as part of a treatment for a disease or clinical condition to calorie-counting diets, vegetarian diets, protein rich diets, sodium gram diets, fluid-restricted diets, renal diets (which utilize fluid, protein and specific electrolyte restrictions such as sodium, potassium, etc.) and cardiac diets (which utilize specific fat, salt, and cholesterol restrictions).
No matter which of the various sources a developer of a weight control program utilizes to make its weight control program publicly available or which type of diet the weight control program utilizes, it is the responsibility of the individual following the weight control program to adhere to the rules, guidelines, and conventions (general rules) of the weight control program. These rules may define the specific foods, times to eat and exercises to be performed, for example. And, as most individuals who have followed a weight control program can testify, in addition to maintaining self-motivation, learning and following these often complex rules tend to be the most difficult parts of staying on, and achieving success with, a weight control program. What is needed is a way to provide dieters with the ability to maintain food consumption within the general rules of a weight control program and to maintain motivation in following these rules.